Before Ice Cream Shop Can Open, City’s Slow Churn

San Francisco Mayor Edwin M. Lee’s office announced last week a $1.5 million fund to help small businesses, calling the sector the “Backbone of SF Economy.”

If true, then the saga of a new ice cream shop seems to indicate that the city needs a good chiropractor.

The Ice Cream Bar opened Jan. 21 in the Cole Valley neighborhood — an homage to the classic parlors of the 1930s, complete with vintage soda fountain and lunch counter seating. It has become an immediate sensation, packed with both families and the foodie crowd, savoring upscale house-made ice creams and exotic sodas (flavorings include pink peppercorn and tobacco). The shop also employs 14 full- and part-time workers.

But getting it opened wasn’t easy.

“Many times it almost didn’t happen,” said Juliet Pries, the owner, with a cheerful laugh.

Ms. Pries said it took two years to open the restaurant, due largely to the city’s morass of permits, procedures and approvals required to start a small business. While waiting for permission to operate, she still had to pay rent and other costs, going deeper into debt each passing month without knowing for sure if she would ever be allowed to open.

“It’s just a huge risk,” she said, noting that the financing came from family and friends, not a bank. “At several points you wonder if you should just walk away and take the loss.”

Photo

Two years of rules and permits later, the Ice Cream Bar is open.Credit
Scott James/The Bay Citizen

Ms. Pries said she had to endure months of runaround and pay a lawyer to determine whether her location (a former grocery, vacant for years) was eligible to become a restaurant. There were permit fees of $20,000; a demand that she create a detailed map of all existing area businesses (the city didn’t have one); and an $11,000 charge just to turn on the water.

The ice cream shop’s travails are at odds with the frequent promises made by the mayor and many supervisors that small businesses and job creation are top priorities.

The matter has also alarmed some business leaders, who point out that few small ventures could survive such long delays.

“Someone of lesser fortitude would have left three months into it,” Ted Loewenberg, president of the Haight Ashbury Improvement Association, said of Ms. Pries. “Through these hard times we’ve heard all the rhetoric about streamlining the process, about one-stop shopping. It hasn’t happened.”

That could soon change. An ordinance easing the process for opening a small business is expected to be considered by the supervisors within weeks. It has already been approved by the planning commission.

“The city has had the reputation of being a difficult place, and a hostile place, to do business,” said Mark Farrell, the city supervisor who has the most private-sector experience (he still operates a venture capital firm). “We’re changing the dialogue.”

According to Mr. Farrell, a critical shift occurred last year when supervisors approved a tax incentive to keep the headquarters of Twitter, the social network, in the city after the company threatened to move.

But he admitted that such actions were relatively easy compared with reforming the city’s entrenched bureaucracy. “To change the inner workings of government is a longer proposition,” he said.

Christina Olague, a former Planning Commission president who was recently appointed city supervisor, said that planning codes governing businesses had ballooned over the years to become hundreds of pages long. “It’s so convoluted,” she said. “It’s so difficult for these businesses to move ahead.”

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Even the planning department itself is calling for reform. “Hello City Planner,” an animated cartoon produced by the department and posted on its Web site, depicts a litany of farcical city hassles faced by a woman applying to sell ice cream.

“Wow! That’s a long time and expensive,” the ice cream lady says after the planning employee in the animation explains the slow process and high fees.

Cases like Ms. Pries’s inspired the video, although some believe her runaround was exceptionally absurd. Even after she acceded to all the city’s demands, her paperwork sat unprocessed for months. Ms. Pries would not say exactly how much it all cost, including construction, but smiled and nodded when asked if it was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And yet, remarkably, she does not complain. Ms. Pries is as effervescent as her sodas, and excited about her prospects — looking ahead, rather than back. Perhaps this optimism is why she finally prevailed, when so many others would have given up.

Scott James is an Emmy-winning television journalist and novelist who lives in San Francisco.

sjames@baycitizen.org

A version of this article appears in print on February 3, 2012, on Page A21B of the National edition with the headline: Before Ice Cream Shop Can Open, City’s Slow Churn. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe